Fault Lines won the Prix Femina, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, and confirmed Nancy Huston's literary eminence in her adopted France. Yet a work more north American in tone, sensibility and language would be hard to imagine.

First published as Lignes de Faille, the novel sold over 400,000 copies in France, was then translated by the Canadian-born author herself with a level of creativity and confidence simply not achievable by the average translator. The result is a glittering showcase of observations of a type reminiscent of so much American dysfunctional family literature since Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections.

Fault Lines follows four generations, their story traced from wartime Germany to contemporary California, and pulls off a structural challenge that is notoriously difficult: it is told backwards. Each quarter of the novel is narrated by a different six-year-old, and again, by choosing first-person, present-tense children's voices to portray periods of history, Huston clearly never set out to give herself an easy life. Her great professional accomplishment is that she overcomes most pitfalls and fulfils the task she sets herself with a steely nerve. The novel is superbly controlled. Whether it has heart is another question.

Fault Lines begins in California with the creepy voice of Sol, the product of modern parenting techniques which are subtly mocked. He is actually monstrous and precocious at a level that strains credibility - at the age of six, he masturbates to internet images of Iraqi torture, believes himself omnipotent, and idolises Bush and Schwarzenegger.

This is a Protestant household with a mother who was originally Catholic and a Jewish father. When Sol's grandmother Sadie visits, she talks incessantly about the Lebensborn - a Nazi project in which 200,000 eastern European children of Aryan appearance, including Sol's great-grandmother, were kidnapped and brought up as Germans. This once-buried strand of family history forms the spine of the novel.

Sol's father Randall has been brought up by his Jewish father and Sadie, a passionate convert to Judaism and lecturer on the nature of evil. Sadie's avid pursuit of the truth behind her mother's history as a Lebensborn child taken from Ukrainian parents during the war results in the neglect of her own son, Randall. At Sadie's insistence the family moves from New York to Haifa before the 1982 Lebanon war, and there Randall falls fruitlessly in love with an Arab girl, his later virulent anti-Arab views clearly having roots in this episode of childhood rejection.

The novel then traces Sadie's childhood as the emotionally deprived daughter of Erra, a singer with little room for a child in her bohemian life. It's only when we move further back to Erra's own childhood in which she is raised as a Hitler-saluting, supposedly German girl named Kristina that we fully understand the effects of Nazism on this family.

Though the children's voices are jarringly sophisticated, Huston's layering of narratives lends an increasingly integrated understanding of family history, and the structure is so seamlessly handled that we are left with neither dangling ends nor any of the usual sense of mystified frustration inherent in reverse chronology. This is an immaculate novel that, on the surface, can barely be faulted. The problem is that it's cold. Even when inhabiting the psyche of a suffering child, Huston maintains a lightly ironic distance from her characters, and while Fault Lines impresses, it utterly fails to move. Despite acute observations and potentially highly emotive subject matter, it reads as an artificial imitation of real life: a clever-clever, shiny version supported by professional craft and research, but one that is ultimately inauthentic. It's an accomplished novel whose soul is missing.